Forever Friends

“Forever Friends” was our Moving Tale for March, Mel and I adapted “Elephant and Dog” a Jataka tale from Ancient India. Moving Tale empowers kids connecting body and brain through the social interaction of yoga storytelling. Kids leave nurtured, feeling self-confident, with focusing skills and a sense of emotional well-being. This month we included healthy relationships to our healthy body and healthy brain message . Our brains are wired to learn and grow from human interactions, our every social relationship. “Forever Friends” an endearing story of friendship is overflowing with eternal truths. So...just what does it take to be a forever friend?

Yoga  gives us the yamas to follow.  The yamas are the  attitudes and observances fundamental to a life lived in unity. They lead us down a path toward a place where we can be a forever friend. Our first step is kindness, ahimsa. We must be kind to a friend. It is often much easier to recognize the unkind thought or word directed toward another but what sort of thoughts and words do we offer to ourselves, for to be kind to another begins with being kind to ourselves. Are our words kind? Are they helpful? The second step leads to truthfulness, satya. Honest communication based on what we know to be true, not gossip, supposition or exaggeration. Commitment to truth is not always easy but at the end of the day, how do we feel about the words we say? Next we hop over to trust, asteya. We take a leap of faith, trusting that our needs will be met. We are not greedy and share what we have. Then comes moderation, brahmacharya, using our energies wisely. How do we express our energy? Do the things we say and do bring us closer or push us away from our friends. Finally we come to generosity, aparigraha. Here we let go of how we expect our friends to be and allow them to be as they are. Each step on the path brings us closer to understanding our relationship to others and our relationship to ourselves.

Story too help us understand the world in which we live and ourselves. The stories we tell; the thoughts we think, the words we say and the actions we take all tell a story. Storytelling and yoga unite our minds to our bodies. Bringing us into the present moment, this is where we experience the relationships of life. We begin to become aware of our stories. Are we being kind and truthful? Do we trust that we are cared for? Are we moderate and generous? As we listen to our own story and practice our yoga we might pause and ask, “Am I becoming the kind of person I would like to have as a friend?”

Mahalo, we serve.

Moving Tale; Kathe and Melanie, tandem yoga storytellers